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Anti-porn feminists connect pornography to harm in several ways. First, they distinguish the harm that occurs in the production of pornography (e.g., the various kinds of coercion, brutality, rape, and other exploitation that can be inflicted upon women making porn) from that which occurs post-production. Second, among post-production harms, some (most notably Catharine MacKinnon) distinguish the view that pornographic materials themselves constitute harm, in the manner of hate speech, from the claim that exposure to these materials causes harm. Since, in my view, it has been satisfactorily demonstrated that framing pornography as hate speech is incoherent and simply collapses into the causal view about pornography, this section will focus on the argument that exposure to pornography causes harm to women.
Finally, with respect to the latter, anti-porn feminists attribute a variety of harms to pornography: there are direct and indirect harms, harms to individual women and harms to women as a group, psychological and physical harms, harms affecting personal relationships and professional lives, harms that are easily discerned as specific events and others that are more diffuse. When discussing the harms that result from exposure to pornography, anti-porn feminists usually ignore the distinctions between these various harms and instead treat them en masse. I contend, however, that lumping the post-production harms together leads to confusions and obscures the nature of the causal connection between pornography and harm. This section, then, will examine the anti-porn feminists' argument with an eye toward disentangling these various sorts of harm that pornography is said to cause.
The argument for the harmfulness of pornography can be summed up in just a few steps. Although it is a simple argument, anti-porn feminists do not articulate its steps clearly and so it is often mischaracterized. For this reason it is worth working through carefully.
(1)
Our society is in part structured by gender inequality in which females suffer many disadvantages as compared with males. This inequality is evident in individuals' attitudes and behavior, and in practices institutionalized in a variety of social structures. For example, females are discriminated against in employment and are on average paid less than males, they bear the greater burden of childcare and household chores, their reproductive freedom is restricted or constantly under threat of restriction, they are subject to various forms of sexual harassment in the workplace and other public arenas, and endure, or at the very least are under the constant threat of, rape, battery, and incest both inside and outside the home. In these and other ways, females, just because they are female, are denied equality of opportunity in many arenas.
(2)
This is a grave injustice.
(3)
The social mechanisms that sustain and reproduce this system are complicated. They involve, among other things: socialization from and early age into to appropriate gender roles according to which males should be masculine (i.e., self-confident, independent, courageous, physically strong, assertive, and dominant) and females should be feminine (i.e., demure, passive, submissive, delicate, and self-sacrificing ). The influence of religion, the sexual division of labor in the household, and the influence of various representational forms such as advertisements, television, movies, popular music and music videos, fashion magazines, and high art also play a role promoting masculinity and femininity as ideals of behavior, and in this way have a hand in sustaining and reproducing gender inequality. And finally, violence and force (as well as the threat of violence and force) play an important role in enforcing gender norms and subordination of women.
(4)
Gender inequality and the mechanisms that sustain and reproduce it have erotic appeal for many people. This can be seen, for example, in the way that gender stereotypes, such as dominance and submissiveness, are sometimes taken as markers of sexiness for men and women, respectively. In its most extreme form, some people find violence against women sexy. Gender inequality in its various forms is sexualized; that is, tied to the experience of sexual pleasure and made sexually stimulating.
(5)
Eroticizing gender subordination is a particularly effective mechanism for promoting and sustaining gender inequality. Its efficacy stems from the fact that tying gender inequality to a pleasure renders that inequality not just tolerable and easier to accept, but even attractive, desirable, pleasurable, and enjoyable. That is, eroticizing gender inequality endows it with extremely pleasing qualities, making it something to pursue. Further, this ties the inequality to not just any pleasure, but to one in which nearly all humans are deeply invested, thereby intensifying the relative significance or value of gender inequality. This eroticization makes gender inequality appealing to women and men alike, since heterosexual (and often bisexual) women pursue the approval of men, the eroticization of sexism is an effective mechanism for getting women to collaborate in their own oppression. Finally, sexualizing gender inequality enlists our physical appetites and desires in favor of sexism. Since physical appetites and sexual desires are typically not amenable to rational criticism and correction (that is, they tend not to be the sorts of states one can argue one's way into or out of), tying sexism to these appetites is an effective way of making it a permanent part of our psychology.
(6)
The erotic appeal of sexism is not inevitable. This particular form of desire is encouraged and stimulated by various institutions, practices, and representations in our society.
(7)
More than any other kind of representation, some pornography eroticizes gender inequality. It fuses gender inequality and pleasure in two ways. First, it does so in terms of its representational content (i.e., what it depicts): it represents women deriving sexual pleasure from sexual abuse, humiliation, and subordination, portraying them as willing victims. Second, some pornography presents this content in such a way as to sexually arouse the viewer, so that he experiences the representation of subordination as sexually arousing. Pornography achieves this primarily through sexual explicitness. By harnessing representations of subordination to an almost universally desired pleasure, pornography gets people to internalize its view of women.
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